How to Build a List Making Habit and Why You Should in 2016

In this post we’ll talk about list making and how it can reduce anxiety and increase our relative levels of happiness.

Just So You Know

This is the text version of my podcast, Tiny Leaps, Big Changes, where I share simple, research-backed, strategies you can use to get more out of your life.

If you’d like to check out the full podcast you can listen to the episode here:

http://bit.ly/ep-1-direct

The Content

One thing I love doing is creating lists. It turns out that this is a good thing because list making is one of the most beneficial habits you or I can add to our toolkit.

Bestselling author, James Altucher, is well known for his suggestion that people should try to list ten ideas every day in order to become, what he calls, an “idea machine”.

More on that in a future post but first, let’s look at some of the benefits list making can have on our health…

The Research:

There’s a reason that articles written in list form are usually so popular. Simply put, lists are much easier for our brains to process in a world of information overload.

What you may not know though is that this is true for the people making lists as well.

In a 2011 article by Cynthia R. Green, Ph.D titled “Why List Making Will Save Your Brain”, Cynthia states:

The best way to deal with information overload is to take control of the information, organizational tools, such as list making, help us to do exactly that.

Many people, including myself, start to feel anxious when dealing with too much information at once. This statement by Cynthia seems to show that one good strategy for dealing with this anxiety is to simply organize all of that information into a list.

This explains why to-do lists can be an effective way of keeping track throughout your workday.

If you’d like to read this article for yourself you can find it here: http://listproducer.com/2011/04/list-making-will-save-your-brain/

The benefits don’t stop there though. It seems that list making is actually an effective way to improve your happiness as well.

A 2013 article on the New Yorker website referring to a 2011 study by psychologists Claude Messner and Michaela Wänke. It said:

They [Claude Messner and Michaela Wänke] concluded that we feel better when the amount of conscious work we have to do in order to process something is reduced; the faster we decide on something, whether it’s what we’re going to eat or what we’re going to read, the happier we become

In regards to making lists, this seems to mean that by limiting our potential options to a set number that can be easily digested we can effectively increase our relative levels of happiness.

You can find both the New Yorker article and the original research here: http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/a-list-of-reasons-why-our-brains-love-lists

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1057740810001312

What Does All of This Mean?

How can you actually use this to reduce your anxiety and increase your happiness? And how is that going to really affect your life anyway?

First we have to look at the context.

Lists can be used in many different situations.

• Listing your expenses is a great way to manage your spending
• Many people create lists to help them focus on the things they are grateful for
• Others use lists to help them break bad habits

Creating lists is all about organizing information and giving ourselves a place to focus.

It’s helpful to remember this in our daily lives as a lot of stress and anxiety develops from not having a place to focus and being too overloaded with information.

My suggestion if you want to take advantage of this information is to start building the habit of creating lists.

Start easy by just creating random lists out of anything and everything. Go for smaller lists as well.

• Right before bed, make a list of 3 things that made you happy throughout the day.
• When you wake up, list out 3 items you remember from your dreams.
• After you shower, make a list of 3 ideas you came up with.

The goal here isn’t to do anything difficult, you are simply trying to build the list making habit so that it will be a default activity when you need it most.

When you are anxious or upset or stressed out, a good practice can be to list out all of the things you are feeling, or all of the things that are upsetting you. But before you will remember to do that, you first need to have the habit built.

Free Resource

To go along with today’s post I’ve put together a short resource on how to build a daily habit around list making. This is the simplest way to incorporate list making into your life and start to reduce your anxiety and increase your happiness.

If you’d like to take advantage of this resource, head over to http://bit.ly/ep-1-podcast.

Action Step:

For the next 7 days I challenge you to make a list at least once a day. It can be a list of anything you want and you should try to keep it small, just make sure you do it.

If you do this challenge, list building will very quickly become a “go-to” activity for you which means that it is something you will be able to think of when you need it the most.

That’s It:

That’s it for this week’s episode. I hope you’ll take part in this weeks challenge. If you’d like a handy resource to help you execute on this week’s information, be sure to visit http://bit.ly/ep-1-podcast.

Resources:

http://listproducer.com/2011/04/list-making-will-save-your-brain/

http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/a-list-of-reasons-why-our-brains-love-lists